Charles Boyer: The French Lover
Charles Boyer was a prolific actor during Hollywood’s golden age and yet the public remembers him mainly for one film. In Gaslight (1944), he played slightly against type as a villain plotting to drive his wife (Ingrid Bergman) over the edge of insanity as he desperately seeks the jewels he’s convinced are hidden in her family’s mansion. And yet, in reading John Baxter’s Charles Boyer: The French Lover, Boyer’s evil husband embodied many characteristics he brought to the romantic lead roles that were his bread and jam.
Boyer was a child during the emergence of silent movies but was drawn to the stage, not the nickelodeon. Although he grew up in a small French town, he came to epitomize Parisian sophistication. Well-read and skeptical in person, he carried his educated urbanity into his film roles as well as a sense of superiority, however modestly veiled. Although not conventionally attractive by Hollywood standards, his sexual magnetism was part of his allure.
Boyer’s film career began in France in 1920 and through the early ‘30s he enjoyed a transatlantic career, traveling between Hollywood and Paris. By the mid-‘30s the money and regularity of work kept him in Hollywood, a place where he found artistic satisfaction only on occasion. Not unlike Cary Grant or Clark Gable but in a register all his own, Boyer had joined the company of actors who always, essentially, played themselves.
Charles Boyer: The French Lover is published by University Press of Kentucky.
